Diagnosis of COVID-19 & Pneumonia from Chest x-ray Scans using Modified MobileNet Architecture

COVID-19 disease has been laid out across the world recently as a global pandemic. Generally, rapid antigen tests have been performed to detect this dangerous disease at an early stage. Due to the increased number of false classification rate caused by rapid antigen tests, real time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) tests have been used as a conventional pathogenic testing tool. However, the efficacy of rRT-PCR tests have been affected by the several mutations in SARS-CoV-2 virus. Therefore, in this paper, a modified MobileNet-based intelligent methodology using chest x-ray (CXR) scans has been put forward to diagnose the COVID-19 disease precisely and early. The propounded method has been applied on benchmark chest x-ray dataset & exploratory results establish the usefulness of the propounded approach.